How to treat compressed folders as files using ShellObject from WindowsAPICodePack?

Question

I am trying to implement a filesystem browser using the WindowsAPICodePack for C# (.Net 4), and it works pretty well, except that the ShellObject system treats zip files as folders, whereas I'd prefer they be files. Is there some way I can force it to work this way? The low-level interop it does is beyond me.

As far as I can tell, internally it asks if the item is a Folder or a Filesystem element. It then uses this (and some type checks) to figure out what it actually is. Is it safe to force it to treat it as a file if it's Compressed? Or do I have to do something else?

Answer 1

Ok, well first, I saw that there was a flag in ShellNativeMethods.SFGAO called SFGAO_COMPRESSED. This doesn't seem to actually appear ever though, maybe it was deprecated?

Failing that, I eventually just cheated and did the following in ShellObjectFactory.cs:

Below:

// Is this item a Folder?
bool isFolder = (sfgao & ShellNativeMethods.SFGAO.SFGAO_FOLDER) != 0;

I added:

// Is this a compressed Folder?
bool isCompressedFolder = (itemType == ".zip");

And then I replaced

else if (isFolder)

with

else if (isFolder && !isCompressedFolder)

This is a total hack, but it seems to work, so unless someone has a better idea I'm sticking with this. Hopefully it'll help someone else out in the future, posts on the WindowsAPICodePack seem pretty rare.